Ice and Crime

Hoping to put behind him tragedy in his professional life and to resolve the turmoil in his personal life, Reykjavik police officer Guðgeir Fransson has moved as far away from home as he can, marking time in a dead-end job in a small town in eastern Iceland. His detective's instincts are triggered when he hears about a foreign woman who arrived in this tight-knit community - and then disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared. The trail of the missing woman takes him back to Reykjavik, and then to a remote farmhouse beneath dark mountains where an elderly woman and her son live with their sinister past.

As a police team is called in to investigate a woman's suicide at the Holmsheiði prison outside Reykjavik, to detective Guðgeir Fransson it looks like a tragic but straightforward case. It's only afterwards that the pieces begin to fall into place and he takes a deeper interest in Kristin Kjarr's troubled background, and why she had found herself in prison. His search leads him to a series of brutal crimes committed twenty years before and the unexplained disappearance of the prime suspect, whose wealthy family closed ranks as every effort was made to keep skeletons securely hidden in closets-while the Reykjavik police struggle to deal with a spate of fresh attacks that bear all the hallmarks of a copycat. Glass Key Award-nominated Icelandic author Solveig Pálsdottir is an exciting new voice in Nordic crime fiction.